We mentioned several times that we have to make our online resources to be readable to machines. XML is a format created to accomplish this. There comes another similar language - YAML, which stands for 'YAML Ain't Markup Language'. In this article, I am going to briefly talk about this language.
Introduction
YAML is a human readable data serialization standard. It was designed so that its syntax could be easily mapped to/from data types used by high-level languages like C or Java. For example, we can represent lists and arrays easily using YAML. There are a number of parsing libraries available in the official page of YAML - I could see that most common languages like C#, Javascript and PHP - have all been included.
Comparison with XML
In contrast to XML, YAML is pretty strong at representing relational data. XML can do this too, but the results may be less readable to human. XML is strong in representing hierarchical data (due to its inherited hierarchical syntax). There are some studies that try to compare the two languages - but I will decline to comment whether YAML or XML is a better data representation language - it all depends on what type of data you would like to represent, and the amount of which.
Introduction
YAML is a human readable data serialization standard. It was designed so that its syntax could be easily mapped to/from data types used by high-level languages like C or Java. For example, we can represent lists and arrays easily using YAML. There are a number of parsing libraries available in the official page of YAML - I could see that most common languages like C#, Javascript and PHP - have all been included.
Comparison with XML
In contrast to XML, YAML is pretty strong at representing relational data. XML can do this too, but the results may be less readable to human. XML is strong in representing hierarchical data (due to its inherited hierarchical syntax). There are some studies that try to compare the two languages - but I will decline to comment whether YAML or XML is a better data representation language - it all depends on what type of data you would like to represent, and the amount of which.
Associated Blog Topic: What is YAML? What are its advantages over XML? Give examples on how an XML document can be represented by a YAML document.
